


Forced Perspective

by 0palite



Category: Invader Zim
Genre: (nobody actually has cancer), Blood and Injury, Broken PAK (Invader Zim), Enemies to Friends, Eye Trauma, Fighting, Fluff, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Hospitalization, Humor, Hurt/Comfort, Major Character Injury, Mentions of Cancer, Sickfic, Slow Burn, Stabbing, Vomiting, Whump, ZADE, ZADF, no seriously I promise there’s gonna be fluff
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-12
Updated: 2021-03-12
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:53:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,415
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29937171
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/0palite/pseuds/0palite
Summary: Zim damages his PAK in a lab accident. It’s certainly nothing to worry about... as long as the Tallest send him those replacement parts before it starts seriously affecting his health. Zim’s injury, and the resulting increase in his strange behavior, inevitably sets Dib off, and his increasing suspicion and paranoia leads to an event that tips the delicate balance of their conflict wildly out of Zim’s favor. One way or another, everything is about to change.
Relationships: Dib & Zim (Invader Zim)
Comments: 22
Kudos: 54





	Forced Perspective

“Welcome home, son!”

“Yes, yes,” Zim muttered, placating the jabbering robot as he held up the torn open plating of its head with one hand and surgered away at it with a multi-tool held by the other. He flicked a switch with his thumb, whistling some simple Earth melody to himself as he neatly carved around a panel with a laser blade. Almost as if in response, the robot’s body gave a huge twitch, spasming and writhing against its metal restraints. Then, with a popping noise, it fell still on the operating table. Smoke curled and rose from behind its teeth. With a creak, its jaws opened, and static garbled out of the speakers in its throat, solidifying into a complete sentence:

“Welcome home, son!”

“Mmmhmm,” Zim hummed, not really listening. His attention was directed towards prying at a memory chip that had come loose in the robot’s cranium. He pressed another button, and a pair of tweezers sprang out of the multitool, with which he began an attempt at pulling the chip out the rest of the way. This wasn’t an easy feat, as the robot had started twitching again, but after a lull in its struggles he gave a deft tug and yanked it free, zipping a mechanical arm out of his PAK with a near identical one to replace it.

After he’d slotted the new chip in, the robot still stuttering out an attempt at a greeting (it had stalled out on “Welcome ho-ho-ho-ho-ho..."), he set to work replacing everything that he had been disassembling for the past twenty minutes. Finally, after the last panel was stapled into place, he dropped down from where he was balanced on his spindly PAK legs, gave a joint-popping stretch, and settled to survey his work. He put his hands on his hips, puffed his chest out in pride, and then, after a glance around at the emptiness of the rest of the dimly lit chamber, shouted.

“GIR! Get in here!”

The effect was immediate. A clunking noise sounded somewhere from in the walls, then another one, and another, each successively louder, until finally the robot in question whizzed out from one of the many tubes snaking around the ceiling. He landed on his perfectly flat head, skidding to a stop at Zim’s feet.

“Yes, my lord!” GIR barked out, raising his hand for an upside down salute.

“Ah, yes, GIR, there you are. Now, witness the results of my labors this evening! Behold!”

He jabbed a button on the side of the table, and with an audible _shunk_ the restraints on the robot dad’s arms, legs, and head withdrew back into the table. The robot sat up shakily, stiffly, still stuttering and working on the same sentence it had been when Zim took its old memory chip out, its huge googly eyes opened wide and vacant.

“Ho-ho-ho-ho-ho—”

“He’s doin’ like Santy Claus!” GIR squealed, delighted.

“No, no, I just haven’t rebooted it yet,” Zim said. He pressed another button and the robot on the table immediately slumped forward. Then he pressed a third, in response to which it twitched back to life and jolted to the floor. It was joined by the corresponding robotic mother, wheeling over from parts unknown. 

“ _Now_ behold!” Zim crowed, stepping aside and waving his arms in a sweeping gesture at the two robot parents beside him.

“Gee, I suuuure do love our booooy,” said the robot mom, slumping over drunkenly to drape its arm over the robot dad’s shoulder.

“Me too!” the robot dad said. It pulled a human smoking apparatus out of nowhere and stuck it in its mouth.

“Mm-HMM!” Zim hummed appraisingly, walking a wide berth around the two robots. “Do you love Zim unconditionally? Would you, perhaps, attempt to ground him for anything?”

The robot mom’s jaw dropped. “Of cooourse not!” it wailed, throwing its head back with the force of its outburst. “We love our son just the way he is!”

“And you won’t ever try to _replace_ Zim with, say, some kind of filthy human zoo animal, yes?” Zim had marched back to the table, and his thumb hovered threateningly over a button labelled ‘deactivate’.

“No way!” The robot dad answered, flailing its noodly arms around. “We love our boy uncond-d-di-d-ditionally!”

Zim did not comment on the stuttering. Instead, he turned back to GIR, smug satisfaction spreading across his face. “You see, GIR, I’ve finally gotten around to upping the loyalty levels on both of these robot decoy parents. There will be no question of who’s in charge now! No question at all!”

GIR wasn’t listening. Still balancing on his head, he wiped a synthetic tear away from an oversized, glowing eye. “I love our boy so much...”

“-And that’s not all!” Zim continued, unperturbed. “I’ve carefully purged their robot brains of every trace of that hideous Earth television you like to watch so much. Observe!” He tapped the robot dad on the thigh. “Oh, dad? What do you use that arm of yours for? You wouldn’t happen to use it for squeezing, or say, secret hidden poking-based martial arts?”

The robot inspected its own boneless arm with wide eyes and slack jaws, as if it were just realizing that it was attached to its shoulder. It gave the pincer hand on the end a few experimental clacks, hesitated for a moment longer, and spouted out, “I use this arm for being proud of my son!”

Zim whipped around to face GIR, quivering with barely suppressed excitement. “INGENIOUS!”

GIR had flopped face forward onto the ground, fully sobbing, a puddle of the indeterminate substance that leaked from his oculars forming beneath him. “I’m soooo proud of our boy.” Then, in a complete flip of both mood and position, GIR popped up to his feet, fished around in the compartment in his head, and pulled out a jug full of dark brown liquid. “You want some chocolate milk!?” he screeched, not even waiting for Zim’s answer before he unscrewed the cap, sloshing it all over the floor.

Zim recoiled in horror as a sharp odor stung his olfactory receptors, shuffling away as the whatever-it-was threatened to splash on his boots. “Augh! _What_ is that horrid stench!?”

“It’s got gas-o-leen innit!”

“Gasoline!?” The robot dad repeated, swaying under both its own weight and that of its motherly counterpart still hanging off of its shoulders. “That’s daaangerous! I gotta protect our bo-o-o-y.”

Just as GIR lifted the jug in preparation for a hearty swig, the dad robot lurched forward to intercept. But then the robot seemed to lose control of itself. Its arms flailed, knocking the mom bot over the back of the operating table. Harsh static hissed out of its voicebox. Then its jaw swung open, and, almost like it intended to swallow the thing whole, it face-planted right onto GIR’s jug.

The explosion was deafening.

  
  


When Zim finally peeled himself off of the floor, his internal clock helpfully informed him that he had been unconscious for exactly ten minutes and eleven seconds. For a good few moments after pulling himself to his feet, he could only groggily stare at the soot stains on the floor tiles, head fuzzy, antennae ringing. The entire floor of his work area was painted black, save for the perfectly clean irken shaped patch he was standing in.

He felt dirty. He brought a hand to his head, but instead of just grit, he also felt something... sticky. He pulled it down to see it smeared slick and pink with blood. Gross.

He supposed it could have been worse. The last time he had knocked his head in a lab accident he’d split his skull clean open and had to spend a couple days lying on the couch with a killer headache, the box of frozen taquitos pressed up against it doing almost nothing to alleviate the pain. GIR, ever unhelpful, sat on top of him and watched cartoons with the volume cranked to maximum. Speaking of which—

“GIR!” Zim wheezed out, voice coming out dry and hoarse. He coughed to clear his throat of soot, and tried again. “GIR! Get over here and clean up your mess!”

No response.

“GIR! You’d better not have wandered off after completely ruining my hard work! GIR? GIR! Answer me!”

And yet, all Zim could hear was the ringing post-explosion silence. One of the robodad’s arms, which had been hanging limply from one of the cords in the ceiling, clattered to the ground.

He paced around the perimeter of the explosion mark, peering with his superior irken vision over every nook and cranny under the dim emergency lights. Or, at least, that was what he was supposed to be doing. Everything looked blurrier than usual for some reason. He rubbed his eyes, frustrated.

“GIR! Come on, GIR!” he paused to kick a spare robot part out of the way. Some twisted piece of metal that might have been part of a foot. “You’re not in trouble if you come out now!” He bargained. “I’ll even order you a—bwah!”

Zim tripped over something in the dark and pitched forward, hitting the floor head first and rattling his already aching skull.

“Stupid explosion, stupid mess!” He staggered to his feet and wound up to kick the offending piece of scrap across the lab—and promptly stumbled and landed on his butt once he realized what it was.

“GIR!” The little robot was crumpled in a heap. Zim clambered to his feet and nudged him with a boot. “Come on, GIR! You can take a nap after you’ve cleaned all this up!”

GIR’s limbs clattered against the floor as he flopped over, lifeless. The cyan backlighting on his oculars was conspicuously absent. Zim scoffed.

“Broken again, great. I need to spend my incredibly valuable time I could be using to conquer this planet on fixing you on top of everything else!” He gestured wildly around at all the mess. The inert robot didn’t respond.

Grumbling, he stomped over to the nearest surface that wasn't either destroyed in the explosion or covered in half-built machines and snack wrappers, (wow, he really needed to clean), and slammed his robot servant down with more than a little excess force.

Now that GIR was out of the way, stepped back to survey the damage to the exploded workspace, hesitated, and then whipped around to the worktable again. Desperate claws pried open the panel on the robot’s chest and sorted through the components inside. Memory chip was intact, logic core, brain simulator... there was a crack in the interior insulation that triggered an emergency power off. A minor repair. Zim clicked the panel closed and breathed a sigh of relie— _exasperation_ , because GIR was such a screw up.

Once again, a certain hypercompetent invader had to be the one getting this base running in some semblance of order.

Now that he thought about it, the dad robot was certainly going to need a total replacement. There were twitching parts all over the lab. Zim was just reaching down to grab a roving eyeball when a wave of vertigo crashed over him, and he had to stick his palms out to catch himself before he crashed headlong into the dirty tile.

He sat for a moment, on his hands and knees, blinking rapidly as the darkness at the edges of his vision slowly subsided. What was that?

“D-awwwwww, honey! Do you gotta splinter?” A voice rang out.

Zim gasped and jerked to his feet, whipping around in time to see the robot mom stumble out from behind the worktable, evidently having used it as shelter against the worst of the explosion.

“Why don’chu come here and let momma make it awllll better,” it screeched, entire torso flopping back and forth as it staggered toward him, half shuffling, half rolling on its wheel-feet.

Zim, though he was all the way across the room and clear of its swinging arms, recoiled. “I—actually, mom, I’m fine on my own, there’s really no need for you to—no—don’t come any closer!”

Miraculously, the updated programming came through. The robot mom lurched to a stop and squawked out, “Well awwwwwllllright honey, I loooove yooou!” Then it turned away and rolled off to go haunt some other sector of the base.

Zim waited until it was out of hearing range before shouting. “Computer! Disassemble the robot mother and send the parts up stairs in preparation for front door deployment.”

A synthesized sigh sounded over the loudspeakers. “Ohkaaaay. Disassembling and moving mother decoy drone.” There was a distant metallic scream heard from the dark corner of the lab that the robot had disappeared to. The computer spoke again. “Disassembly complete... But, uh, sir, are you, uh, okay?”

“Eh? What kind of question is that?” Of course Zim was okay. He was Zim. The computer should have known that.

“Well, you kind of have a... something... on your PAK,” it responded delicately.

“My PAK?” Zim echoed. “What are you talking about? Show me!”

“Uuaagghhhh. Fine. Look, here.” A pair of metallic arms descended from the ceiling, holding a floor-length mirror.

Zim squinted into his reflection. He definitely looked like he had just gotten a faceful of explosion. Almost three quarters of his face was painted black with soot, the coloring broken by a line of pink trickling down from the cut on his head. His right antenna had a bend midway through—and, now that he was looking at it, felt quite sore. Guess that was why he was hearing ringing and having trouble balancing. He gave it an experimental poke, and a burning sensation ran down through the length and into his scalp, making him shudder.

But none of that was bad enough to take more than a few hours to heal. Zim turned flippantly up to the ceiling towards where he assumed the computer’s speakers were and said, “I’m fine, what are you talking about!?”

“Your PAK, sir! Look at your PAK!”

“Uh? Heh? Huh?” Zim twisted his neck, trying to get a good look at his PAK. Seeing as it was affixed to his spine, this proved near impossible. Then he remembered the mirror was still there. He looked back towards it, turning his body to an angle where his PAK was visible in the reflection.

That was strange. There was a stray piece of robot on his back. He moved. It moved with him, almost like it was stuck right into his—

Oh. Oh dear.

  
  



End file.
